Ther's lots of ways to slice the #DemocraticParty coalition, but one important axis are the self-styled adults-in-the-room, who declare themselves realists, and the party's left wing, who are dismissed as idealists who don't understand politics: neither how to win elections nor how to wield power.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/2
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/6
Then, after the election, he switched off that grassroots.
Literally.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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If #FDR's (possibly apocryphal) motto was "I want to do it, now make me do it"; Obama's was "I want to do it, now go away."
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/9
Think of #TimGeithner, Obama's Treasury Secretary, who counseled that the banks should be bailed out with no strings attached, not even a requirement that they halt the seizure and liquidation of swathes of Americans' family homes.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/10
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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Now, maybe business-as-usual would have been even worse. Perhaps not passing the ACA would have left Americans poorer and sicker. But we're not comparing ACA with doing nothing - we're comparing ACA with more muscular, direct programs, like #M4A.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/17
What if he'd governed like Lincoln, or FDR:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court
There's a name for this kind of politics: it's called #Deliverism:
https://prospect.org/politics/case-for-deliverism/
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The Case for Deliverism
David Dayen (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/18
Deliverism is a subject of hot debate in the Democratic Party, because Biden is an empty vessel that gets filled by different party factions, which means that his policy is incoherent.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/19
The responsible grownups say that deliverism is dead, because voters mostly respond to hot-button cultural issues, while material improvements in their lives barely move the needle:
https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-death-of-deliverism/
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The Death of “Deliverism”
Democracy JournalCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/20
In their rebuttal in *#TheAmericanProspect*, @ddayen and #MattStoller point out that for most Americans, Obamacare *didn't* produce any improvement to their health care.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/21
https://prospect.org/politics/2023-06-27-moving-past-neoliberalism-policy-project/
The rise in health care costs is no mystery: monopolies have taken over healthcare.
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Moving Past Neoliberalism Is a Policy Project
Matt Stoller (The American Prospect)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/22
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/18/wages-for-housework/#low-wage-workers-vs-poor-consumers
Every layer of the healthcare stack is has grown steadily more concentrated since the Obama years: "Hospitals, doctor’s practices, health insurance, pharmaceuticals, ambulances, nursing homes, rehab facilities."
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/23
> Every part of our health care world is increasingly controlled by greedy bankers who kill people for money.
The same corporate concentration has eroded wages, meaning that workers are paying for higher healthcare cost out of smaller paychecks.
Stoller and Dayen argue that the polls show that politicians who make material improvement to voters' lives *do* win popularity.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/24
Sure, Biden couldn't order Manchin to support the Child Tax Credit. But he *could* have gone to WV and campaigned for it with Manchin's base.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/25
The grownups say that if Biden had done that, he might have alienated Manchin and lost future votes, or caused Manchin to run as a Republican in his next election.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/26
The grownups in the Democratic party say we can't win by campaigning on economic issues like monopoly, nor on pocketbook issues like M4A. But when Biden slashed the cost of insulin, his approval numbers shot up.
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff
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Cory Doctorow
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https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
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Cory Doctorow
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Cory Doctorow
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https://doctorow.medium.com/a-collective-bargain-a48925f944fe
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A Collective Bargain - Cory Doctorow - Medium
Cory Doctorow (Medium)Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/32
That doesn't invalidate deliverism as a strategy for winning elections. People may not have the time or interest to follow politics in detail.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/33
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-often-do-health-insurers-deny-patients-claims
But even if that data were out there, there's only so much attention people can or want to pay to their insurance policies.
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How Often Do Health Insurers Deny Patients’ Claims? No One Knows.
ProPublicaCory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/34
Improving peoples' lives isn't merely good governance - it's also good politics. Playing hardball is hard and can be unpleasant, sure, but most of the risk from taking big swings while in office is that the voters won't stand with you and give you the political capital to score big wins.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/35
For all the failings of the GOP's radical wing (and there are many such failings), there is this one virtue: they get stuff done.
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Cory Doctorow
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/36
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos
The Democrats don't need to copy the GOP's abandonment of material policy for ideological hardlines. Indeed, it shouldn't: when they go low (culture war bullshit), we go high (delivering real benefit to voters).
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Cory Doctorow
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woolie
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/14
Ian Sudbery
•Ostrzeżenie o treści: Long thread/5
Änn Euing 📜
•Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.
myrmepropagandist
•The Janx Devil
•Cory Doctorow
•David Wayne Thompson
•Yes, I remember that. Obama the campaigning firebrand turned into Obama the absent-father bureaucrat once elected, and then he seemed clueless as to what was going to happen in the midterms. Gah, politics in this country is frustrating.
Cory Doctorowudostępnił to.
Cory Doctorow
•Cory Doctorow
•your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
•@pluralistic
call obstructionist Democrats what they are: machiavellians.
when researching the psychosociology of fascism i stumbled upon the concept of the Dark Tetrad. was surprised machiavellism is one of the "personality traits understood to be dispositions toward amoral and antisocial behavior"
really super important for understanding how "oppositions" end up enabling fascists & defending the fascist status quo
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-56733-006